The flaw in having Milo Yiannopoulos talk at Rutgers

Raise your hand if you have been personally victimized by Milo Yiannopoulos. Unless you’re male and white, you should be raising your hand.

Milo Yiannopoulos, self proclaimed “most fabulous supervillain on the internet,” is a journalist but has made more of a name for himself over the past few years by saying offensive shit just to be offensive.  And on February 9th, he’ll be coming to our very own Rutgers to give a talk called, “How the Progressive Left is Destroying American Education,” which honestly makes very little sense considering he’s not even American – he’s British.

Yiannopoulos is no stranger to people challenging his views and has faced protests and even bans from universities in the UK, citing their “safe space” policies. For his visit to Rutgers, he has said he’s expecting the same.

Now, I’m not the biggest fan of the guy. I consider myself a liberal intersectional feminist, which to a lot of people is unattractive, but whatever. The point is I believe Yiannopoulos’ views are harmful to society and actively work to continuously bring down people who have already spent their entire lives getting brought down. In spite of my own views,  I think it’s incredibly important that opinions that differ from my own exist, especially on college campuses. It keeps those places from becoming boring and keeps students from becoming sheep instead of people.

With that being said, it’s totally okay to bring in someone who’s views aren’t mainstream or challenge the norm. But this is a place of higher learning, as pretentious as that sounds. If you’re going to have someone talk to college students, it might be nice if they have some level of expertise of what the fuck they’re talking about.

Milo Yiannopoulos is not that. He dropped out of college not once, but twice. Which wouldn’t be bad if Yiannopoulos had actually achieved something besides internet notoriety. He’s not an expert at anything except being an internet troll who’s managed to get their views off the internet and into the air. The only reason he’s popular is because he saw an opportunity in Gamergate to spew his sexist opinions and capitalize off of them. He talks and tweets and writes and blogs nonstop, and from the tone of voice in his tweets and written works, it’s pretty clear that the only thing he really cares about is himself.

Don’t get me wrong, he has just as much right to free speech as anyone else. I’m not trying to silence him. I just honestly want to know how and why he thinks he can talk to us about American education, Black Lives Matter, feminism, and other issues that affect people today, especially when none of it affects him.

To tie it all up, my message to Milo is this: Stay in your lane.